An Autoethnography of Becoming a Qualitative Researcher chronicles
Trude Klevan's personal experiences of her doctoral journey, with Alec
Grant as an external academic resource and friend, and her subsequent
entry into the neoliberal higher education environment. It gives a
personal and intimate view of what it's like to become an academic.
This book is constructed as an extended dialogue which frequently
utilizes email exchanges as data. Firmly grounded in the epistemic
resource of friendship, it tells the story of the authors' symbiotic
academic growth around their critical understanding and knowledge of
qualitative inquiry and the purposes of such knowledge. The tale told is
of the unfolding of a close and mutually beneficial relationship,
entangled within sometimes facilitative, sometimes problematic,
environmental contexts. It uses these experiences to describe, explore,
and critically interrogate some underlying themes of the philosophies,
politics, and practices of qualitative inquiry, and of higher education.
Disrupting conventional academic norms through their work, friendship,
and correspondence, Trude and Alec offer a critical and epistemological
view of what it's like to become a qualitative researcher, and how we
can do things differently in higher education.
This book is suitable for all researchers and students, their
supervisors, mentors, and teachers, and academics of qualitative
research and autoethnography, and those interested in critiques of
higher education.
